Noam Chomsky's World Orders, Old and New
Wolin, Richard
WORLD ORDERS, OLD AND NEW, by Noam Chomsky. Columbia University Press, 1994. 311 pp. $24.95. Toward the third hour of the hagiographic documentary about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, a...
...In the words of the historian Louis Hartz, these actions were spurred by an ideology of"Americanism," which hypocritically proceeded to negate at will the rights to national selfdetermination of peoples around the globe...
...foreign policy take on a less monolithic cast and begin to make sense...
...He thereby abets the process of depoliticization and left-wing marginalization he seeks to contest...
...Chomsky is far from wrong in emphasizing the structural limits to opinion formation in an era in which corporate-owned mass media play such a disproportionate role in shaping public perceptions...
...Admittedly, postwar American foreign policy in Latin and Central America, Southeast Asia, and Iran (where in 1953 the United States helped to overthrow the Mossadegh regime in favor of the shah) has been a series of disasters predicated upon an imperious conception of national self-interest...
...q SUMMER • 1995 • 423...
...Instead, it may more accurately be described as the type of "corporate mercantilism" whereby governance is increasingly in the hands of huge private institutions and their representatives...
...They are economic, strategic, and— though Chomsky would be loath to admit it—at times ethical...
...In the early 1980s I had a radical-activist friend from Berkeley named Andy...
...This politics of cynicism and exploitation reached new heights with the Reagan administration's immoral (and, as it turned out, erroneous) distinction between totalitarian regimes, said to be unreformable from within, and authoritarian dictatorships, with whom one could safely climb into bed without losing one's virtue...
...At several points in World Orders Chomsky describes contemporary American society as totalitarian in a nonmetaphorical sense...
...foreign policy past and present, the concept of moral leadership in the sphere of world politics remains a valuable aspiration...
...interests (which are eminently national) and those of the TNCs (whose boundaries tanscend the nation-state) predominate, when, in crucial respects, they operate at cross-purposes...
...Only if he were to acknowledge this concept would his criticisms of U.S...
...At times, however, Chomsky tries to have it both ways...
...Yet, because they are multinational, they are less and less subject to controls...
...We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations...
...State Department strategists would, I'm sure, be extremely gratified if American "total world domination" functioned in reality as smoothly as Chomsky claims...
...Instead of a newfound international harmony, what we have now that communism has been expelled from the world stage is an unfettered opportunity for rapacious first world nations to exploit less fortunate inhabitants in other parts of the world...
...For one cannot claim at the same time that both U.S...
...But they should be acknowledged for what they were: a precarious yet historic first step...
...During the ensuing question session an agitated undergraduate type steps to the microphone and has this to say: For the last hour and forty-one minutes you've been whining about the elite and how the government has been using thought control to keep people like yourself out of the public limelight...
...I'll call it the "Andy fallacy...
...In response, Chomsky says something about its not being a question of individuals: "It has to do with marginalizing the public and ensuring that they don't get in the way of elites who are supposed to run things without interference...
...In the months preceding Reagan's reelection in 1984, Andy chose a different hobby horse to ride...
...The problem with the "propaganda model," however, is that it is only capable of providing a series of self-fulfilling prophecies...
...The final bill for such policies and practices, moreover, has yet to be paid in full...
...But his cover has been blown...
...In the aftermath of the Vietnam War a cultural consensus had developed about acceptable thresholds of American military intervention abroad—a consensus that considerably raised the domestic political stakes of any such move...
...policymakers themselves are free of competing factions or interests...
...For the first time, the two protagonists are officially on speaking terms, and a negotiated settlement to the dispute, rather than a new Arab-Israeli war, is a tenuous possibility...
...I don't see any thought control...
...Almost lost amid Chomsky's rhetorical excesses in World Orders, Old and New is a timely (yet all too brief) discussion of economic "internationalization"— the 1980s buzz word for the growing world dominance of transnational corporations (TNCs), as supported by U.S.-dominated financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank...
...But even such promising analyses risk becoming muddled...
...Often enough, he inclines toward the latter characterization...
...Even the case of the Gulf War—the new world order litmus test, which, in Chomsky's eyes, we flunked spectacularly— involved a tissue of motivations and goals that are far from easy to sort out...
...They herald the birth of a new world economic situation in which capital has become ruthless and, unlike labor, highly mobile...
...The accords were far from perfect, and there remains a long and difficult path ahead...
...Along with the nations of G-7 and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, these corporations and organizations play an increasing role in determining the state of the world economy as well as the distribution of wealth among rich and poor nations...
...His critical flaw is to present a portrait of U.S...
...One might ask Chomsky if, when, circa 1968, Walter Cronkite wondered aloud on the CBS Evening News what the hell we were doing in Vietnam—this was merely another instance of "pseudo-difference...
...But in World Orders such balanced insights are virtually nonexistent...
...In Chomsky's words, the TNCs are "totalitarian in internal structure, quite unaccountable, absolutist in character, and immense in power...
...We are allowing you to speak...
...But even before his ignominious involvement in the Faurisson affair (for the relevant details, see Anson Rabinbach's article, "Memories of Assassins, Assassins of Memory," Dissent, Spring 1994), his views on Middle Eastern affairs had become suspect...
...Often, their harsh stipulations threaten to destabilize democratically elected regimes...
...The real difference between a genuine totalitarian society and our own—despite its manifest injustices and inequities—has suddenly been laid bare...
...With Hamas, a new uncompromising militancy has emerged on the scene, causing Israel to finally treat the PLO as a desirable partner in peace...
...SUMMER • 1995 • 421 Books Chomsky, however, relentlessly indicts the opportunism of Arafat and the PLO for having signed the accords...
...The current world economic order has practically nothing to do with free enterprise...
...In so-called democratic societies, he says, gentler techniques must be used to preserve order— thereby implying that though the means differ, the end results are more or less the same...
...Now I don't see any CIA men waiting to drag you off...
...and that the wishes and actions of the third world nations we are trying to rule present no obstacle to the realization of our aims...
...Since, according to this model, all differences of opinion are a priori "pseudo-differences," "authentic differences" by definition fail to register...
...According to his "propaganda model" of opinion formation, dissent always takes place within well-defined limits...
...Selected quotations, however, fail to do justice to the Orwellian vision of American political life on almost every page of this heavyhanded, fact-filled, citation-laden jeremiad...
...At issue are policies that wreaked untold misery on innocent third world peoples, policies that were motivated by an exaggerated fear of communism and a puritanical self-righteousness...
...Our power placed us above the rest...
...If so, what would a genuinely dissident opinion look like...
...It is fairly easy to identify what is amiss with Chomsky's views...
...There is also a moral-ideal component that derives from our own democratic traditions, according to which the principles of national self-determination and freedom count...
...For only then could one begin to distinguish between naked self-interest and a more principled and fairminded orientation toward world affairs...
...The institutions are totalitarian in character: in a corporation, power flows from top down, with the outside public 422 • DISSENT Books excluded....National governments, which in varying ways involve some measure of public participation, are constrained by such external factors to serve the interests of the rich and powerful even more than in the past...
...This is the story that Chomsky tries to tell, but it has been told before and better by others...
...In fact, one of the main problems of Chomsky's approach is that it seems incapable of even acknowledging the concept of justifiable or legitimate strategic interests...
...In the end one gets the feeling that it is Chomsky himself who needs this monolithic image of opinion formation for the sake of confirming his own status as a maligned and misunderstood radical intellectual...
...The PLO, we are told, has displayed a willingness for peace for some time...
...Readers of his earlier books will be readily familiar with the arguments...
...To be sure, the agreement came at a time when the PLO's popularity among Palestinians had waned considerably...
...Toward the third hour of the hagiographic documentary about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, a moment of truth emerges...
...As Chomsky glosses them: "To rule is the right and duty of rich men dwelling in deserved peace...
...Churchill's words become the book's leitmotif...
...To paraphrase Delmore Schwartz: "Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean there aren't people who are really out to get me...
...Let me try to expose some of the shortfalls of Chomsky's reasoning by way of an anecdote...
...He was convinced that as soon as Reagan was reelected, American troops would pour into Nicaragua to overthrow the Sandinistas...
...His only hesitancy concerns whether the United States is "totalitarian" or "fascist...
...Despite the failures of U.S...
...Chomsky is lecturing at the University of Wyoming...
...influence abroad...
...So what are you whining about...
...What Chomsky seeks to show in World Orders, Old and New is that talk of a "new world order" is so much deceitful verbiage...
...troops would have intervened...
...The last chapter of World Orders consists of a lengthy indictment of the recent Palestinian-Israeli peace accords...
...World order, past and present, boils down to a type of "codified international piracy...
...He views the entire peace process as little more than a plot to preserve U.S.Israeli political hegemony in the region...
...There is nothing "mutual" about the conflict...
...Any views that threaten to overstep these boundaries automatically fail to register...
...power at home and abroad so monolithic and impregnable that despair or inaction become the only possible responses...
...Contra Chomsky, McDonald's and General Motors do not control the State Department— or at least not yet...
...At one or more levels they inevitably underlie foreign policy considerations...
...instead, Israel alone, a proxy of U.S...
...that's where everyone here heard you were coming from, and I'm sure they're going to publish your comments in the paper...
...Striving to revive the old thesis about American society as a form of "soft totalitarianism," Chomsky argues that in the totalitarian societies of old, the state routinely used force to keep the public in line...
...Why then does it take a twenty-yearold college student from Laramie, Wyoming, to point out the obvious...
...In a lot of countries you would have been shot for what you've done today...
...The conditions for debt repayment they have imposed on third world nations in South America and Africa have been notoriously draconian...
...As we now know, Reagan and his accomplices were instead forced to resort to a series of embarrassing illegalities—Iran-contrawhich, when unmasked in 1986, paralyzed his ability to govern and permanently tarnished the image of his administration...
...In the end, though, he concludes that such differences of opinion do not really matter— they are merely pseudo-differences...
...To psychologize Chomsky's long-standing contempt for Israel as a stereotypical instance of Jewish self-hatred would be simplistic...
...In a world where economic, military, and geopolitical competition is rife, questions of principle, unfortunately, rarely come first...
...Our interest in seeing democracy prosper in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and in South America is neither purely economic nor purely strategic—though only a naif would deny that such motives play a large role...
...But also at stake were solidarity with traditional allies (Israel as well as moderate Arab regimes), as well as the need to stand up to a regional tyrant...
...What is wrong with Chomsky's account is that it is too seamless, too monolithic...
...Andy loved to tell stories of how close we had come in the waning days of the Nixon administration to either a coup d'etat, nuclear war, or (preferably) both...
...As a result, in recent years corporate profits have risen dramatically while wages measured in real terms continue to sink...
...Undeniably, national selfinterest was prominent...
...Unlike the corporations of old, today's TNCs are devoid of regional loyalties or a sense of an ethical obligation to their employees...
...For Chomsky's unilateralist model proceeds according to the assumption that U.S...
...He begins with a review of U.S...
...According to one report, at present they control as much as one-third of the world's private-sector productive assets...
...Journalistic support for the Gulf War amounted to an "exultant display of fascist values...
...In his view, our international policies and interventions are purely interest-driven, and the interests are of the basest sort...
...But the realities of global politics are more complex than he will allow...
...And the reason for this is simple...
...that foreign policy is wholly insulated from popular domestic pressures and influences...
...In truth, Chomsky is grinding an all-too-familiar axe...
...In earlier works Chomsky has acknowledged the importance of an oppositional political consensus in deterring heightened levels of U. S. intervention in Central America (see, for example, Turning the Tide...
...foreignpolicy altruism—that is, claims to the effect that we are interested in promoting democracy and human rights in addition to the creation of "markets"— as so much ideological pap...
...In a real totalitarian society, someone like Chomsky would not be allowed to speak, let alone publish books (at an astronomical rate, one might add) that are widely discussed and reviewed...
...In Chomsky's view the first and last word on world orders, old and new, was set forth by Winston Churchill following World War II: "The government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had...
...On this complicated terrain motives and interests are far from onedimensional...
...Thus, in a previous book, Manufacturing Consent, written with Edward Herman, he admits that tensions and divisions among ruling elites indeed exist...
...But at a time when one would do well to fan the precarious embers of hope, Chomsky heaps nothing but bile on those who seek compromise...
...In an imperfect international political scene, the Middle East is one of the least perfect regions...
...The hidden agenda of the recent Middle East peace agreement permits "the United States and Israel [to move] towards more rational forms of imperial control [of the Occupied Territories]," such as those used by "the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe [and] Nazi Germany in occupied France...
...420 • DISSENT Books Chomsky views any expression of U.S...
...imperialism, is at fault...
...foreign policy during the cold war, which he defines as a mechanism of "population control": a pretext for creating a security state that was as much concerned with domestic repression as with expanding U.S...
...Concerning the chorus of media approval that greeted the Clinton administration's 1993 raid on Baghdad (in retaliation for Iraq's alleged plans to assassinate PresiSUMMER • 1995 • 419 Books dent Bush on a 1992 visit to Kuwait), Chomsky remarks: "The rulers of any totalitarian state would be impressed...
...Along the way Chomsky serves up a number of timeworn left-wing platitudes...
...Here, too, Chomsky's ideological obsessions stand in the way of the type of nuanced and responsible social analysis that is so desperately needed by the left today...
...But that is not to say a la Chomsky that they are nonexistent...
...Now I'll concede the point that if Reagan had been allowed to act in accordance with his preferences U.S...
...He has just finished his familiar stump speech: fifty reasons why we live in a totalitarian society...
...allies always stand in agreement withAmerican goals and intentions...
...You were in the paper...
...But the interesting thing is that this did not happen...
...Much less easy is the intricate task of sorting out what may be of value in Chomsky's hyperbolic saga ofAmerican totalitarianism at home and abroad...
...In ways that are often imperceptible, they set implicit limits to what we as a nation consider acceptable...
...If the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations, there would always be danger...
...They are not wrong, but the picture they paint is extremely partial...
...that, likewise, U.S...
...Upon closer inspection, these superficial differences of opinion are actually more insidious, argues Chomsky, inasmuch as they perpetuate the delusory image of a free society...
...As it is, Chomsky's leftism implicitly sanctions a neo-isolationism that, at the moment (and far from coincidentally), is also quite popular with the far right...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
